Ongoing HTPC Motherboards with HDMI (2 Viewers)

[mascot]

The 780g won't dissapoint us... read too many tests now with all great results.

Hope we have the gigabyte by cebit time..

 

[Netzdiver]

Hy mascot,

The gigabyte board is announced at 27. or 28. Feb in some german onlineshops!! Price arround 80€.

Thats only one week!! You will get it!!

Now I have a little quaestion. You wrote that the BE-2400 and 5000+ CPU´s will be possible to cool passive! What sense are playing the cases in that scenario?? And 2. question - you thing full HD (BLURAY / HD-DVD / X264) will work on this shared memory card??

THX Netzdiver

 

[mascot]

Scythe and Antec worked closely together making the Scythe mini ninja. Without the included fan this cooler can passivly cool the BE-2x00 or the 5000+ black edition without problems.

Reviews of this combination gave the result of 45 degrees celcius on a BE-2300 at full load for almost 6 hours. (Antec Fusion V2, two 120 mm Noctua 800 rpm fans running LOW and CPU overclocked to 2.1 Ghz)

The scythe mini ninja has a big cooling area and comes close to the chassi fans. The noctua 120 mm fans 800 rpm model have a (true in reviews) noiselevel of <8 db per fan!!

I got an email from Gigabyte sweden today and they say that RS780 is not officially released by AMD yet. But he was 95% certain of a release of this motherboard during the first quarter, and you're right end of this month seems true then...

I hope so anyway! Are the delivery dates of end of February confirmed by Gigabyte or whoever delivers the product to these shops?? Can u gimme a link for those shops I might order it frpm germany if Its not released here in Sweden yet...

Regarding to the hardware acceleration capabilities of the RS780 chipset (with ATI HD3200 GPU including AVIVO HD technology with UVD+) the first tests around says things like 20% CPU load on 1080p bluray ~28 mbit bitrate discs - with a single core athlon 3500+ !!!!

With a 5000+ black edition or a slightly overclocked BE-2400 you can playback even 1080p x264 mkv's without a problem with a effektive codec.

X264 .mkv is tougher than bluray discs (or hddvd discs) because the x.264 compression is not an official standard (yet) wich makes some issues regarding hardware acceleration. Currently hw acc on x264 mkv's is not 100% supported, but a 2.3-2.8 ghx dual core will do it anyway I think...

 

[ichessblumen]

I hope so anyway! Are the delivery dates of end of February confirmed by Gigabyte or whoever delivers the product to these shops?? Can u gimme a link for those shops I might order it frpm germany if Its not released here in Sweden yet...

hi mascot,

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H, 780G (dual PC2-8500U DDR2) Preisvergleich bei Geizhals.at Deutschland here are some shops which have listed the GA-MA78G.

I ordered mine here: eMedia-Shop.de - GIGABYTE MA78GM-S2H SocketAM2+ FSB5200 mATX RS780 VGAoB HD3200 A AC_1391474

Whatever, I got a confirmation from the shop...for the 18th feb...lol, now they say 25th. anyway, these boards are available in China... so, it'll come soon. one more week...who cares.

 

[infinite.loop]

in the current C't was a test of mainboards with onboard HDMI out.
none of the tested boards is useable for playing BR-Discs.

 

[Netzdiver]

1.
Hy mascot,
sorry!! I have yestaday evening no time to look into the forum, but ichessblumen (the old flowereater ) has do this job! THX

2.
infinityloop!?
the C't team tested also testet the new 780g chipset??

what do you thing is the best hardware solution!?

THX Netzdiver

 

[infinite.loop]

infinityloop!?
the C't team tested also testet the new 780g chipset??

i dont know. i will have a look at the test later today and tell you then.

what do you thing is the best hardware solution!?

that strongly depends on your needs

 

[mascot]

There are several tests on the RS780 allready, and the results are good from completely different independent sources. One test gave 20% CPU load on single core athlon 3500+ playing back Casino royals toughest chapter with averga bitrate of 28 mbit in 1080p.

With the simplest dual core CPU you will playback blyray discs without any problems.

With the older chipsets, for example 690g with Radeon X1250 onboard GPU you only get partial hardware acceleration and the older version of Avivo technology without HD support and any sort of UVD.

The HD3200 GPU in RS780 (780g) has full hardware acceleration with AVIVO HD and UVD+!! Same technology as in the standard discrete graphics boards like the ATI Radeon HD2x00 and 3x00 series.

The ATI Radeon HD2600XT graphics card has also full hardware acceleration with AVIVO HD support. Several different reviews of this (and the 2400pro, the HD2400xt etc) have given the same great results with bluray discs. 15-30% average CPU load on slow dual core processors, have seen tests with good results on dual core E2140, AMD 4000+ etc etc.

All those tests cannot be lying. The test you refer to must be older chipset Matx boards with HDMI like Asus P5E-VM HDMI or the Am2 platform boards from Asus with 690g chipset and only Radeon x1250 GPU onboard.

 

[kszabo]

I got played everything with my x1250 (with the power of X2 BE-2400 2x2,3 GHz),with a lot of codec and other setup tuning. 1080i with 20 MBPS etc. (no bluray stuff with hdcp tried though)

BUT I have to say, it is not enough, that I get whole fps without dropped frames, no stuttering etc. The x1250 is not capable to deliver good picture quality. I can´t get it deinterlace everything nicely and reproducable (1080i not at all). I suspect some ghosting problem even with normal SDTV mpg2. I reached the point definitely that I will upgrade it (maybe to the 780G chipset).

C´t test Boards with onboard graphics:
they tested only the g35 chipset from Intel against the older G31 and the nvidia 7150/630i chipset. Not even the 690G/x1250 from ATI was there. The new 780G also not.

 

[globaldonkey]

Asus P5e-vm Hdmi

Well, I finally went and bought this board.

No problems with enough grunt to easily process 1080p h.264 files through ffdshow. CPU hits about 35%. Don't have a BR drive at the moment, so can't comment on that aspect.

BUT the HDMI interface is terrible. I've had to go back to VGA. The fonts are unreadable, and there are all sorts of issues with overscanning and cropping. Lots of ireports of the same thing on the ASUS forum (probably would not have bought the board if I was able to see this BEFORE I registered a product and could get access to the forum). I did read somewhere in the graphics driver software that the resolutions were limited and they were waiting for some updated G35 drivers from Intel. Looks like ASUS have some work to do on this board. I'm disappointed the HDMI is virtually unusable, but I'm hoping that will get fixed soon, and the system certainly does handle 1080p H.264.

Anybody else actually using HDMI on any of their systems with onboard GPU's? Have you had to change in MP settings (like decoders etc) to get a good display?